Do we learn from our dreams? A psychologist might say yes, they’re a window into the subconscious. They churn up all kinds of legitimate processes. Okay, then. What of our drug trips?
The scientific attitude to hallucinogens has been wary ever since the days of Timothy Leary and R.D. Laing. A psychiatrist might claim that dreams reveal hidden aspects of our psyche that we can use to understand our behavior and achieve mental balance. But I think it is accepted that even though the psychedelic experience is also a window into the subconscious, even a more naked window, the experiment is far more dangerous and uncontrollable than a session on the analyst’s couch, and would be morally complex even if it were not legally complex.
And some practitioners, let’s be honest, are hostile to a shortcut. Psychiatry is a science — here are my credentials framed on my wall — and a business. It will take you months of visits before you are free of your hang-ups, if you ever are.
And besides, if we eventually discover that the root of your disturbance is this deep-buried desire you have to copulate with your own mother, then a hefty acid trip in which you spend seven hours in a nightmare ecstasy of screwing the woman while your father holds her down might leave you a little more shaken coming out than you were going in.
Almost a century on from Albert Hofmann’s dramatic bicycle ride, and well over half a century since hordes of hippies were flopping naked in the mud on Owsley acid, the world is still not ready for strong trips. Probably it never will be.
The question remains, though. If a dream is a legitimate window into the mind, why isn’t a trip? What is it about the psychedelic experience that muddles the research? You may say we don’t understand how hallucinogens work. But we don’t know how the brain works, either. We have no solid notion on why we need to sleep, let alone dream.
Meanwhile, vast numbers of people, most of them young people, continue to inflict these devastating journeys on themselves using various manmade chemicals and natural highs and do so without expert supervision or counselling. And no, the mock-shaman banging his skin drum while you imbibe your ayahuasca in a tourist trip trap doesn’t count. Experimenters are basically left to themselves, and the fact that so many of them benefit from the experience more than compensates for the few (generally those who ignored set and setting, or were coerced into it, or lacked information in advance) who have a bad time and suffer long-term afterwards.
I’m not here expressing any belief that the psychedelic trip is a genuine alternate reality, or even that it tells us a great deal of usable truth. I don’t make those claims for dreams, either, or for psychiatry. Still, I’ve taken a lot of trips in my life so far, had magical journeys and miserable ones, and learned something fundamental about myself. In turn, these experiences have shaped the way I view the world, the way I interact with reality, and the way I write. A great deal of my fiction has been informed by the psychedelic experience, sometimes positively, sometimes not.
And I’ve gone as far as I could go on the strongest chemicals I could find using the biggest doses I could bear. That’s crazy, right? Still, if you’re crazy going in, there’s little danger that you’ll be even crazier coming out, and at times logic like this is the only thing left to cling onto in the slippery reaches of the trip.
Let me go back a bit. I spent much of my teens wondering about god. I did the whole religious thing, emotionally and academically. I underwent rather heavy duty theological research. Growing up in rural England, my primary points of cultural contact were that curious mix of Christianity and paganism common to farming communities. Spiritually I veered far more toward the latter. Christianity seemed to me too simple-minded, a set of facile laws and self-evident moral virtues that needed to be wrapped up in a punishment/reward system for the savages to adhere to them. In brief: don’t piss on the floor, don’t hurt the people you live with. Paganism offered haunted woods and skulls in the earth and that creeping horror I was all too familiar with in dark nights far from a streetlamp. A more vital and meaningful and connected form of spiritualism.
So what and where and in what manner was god? Enter the hallucinogenic quest. Let’s go on this trip together.
According to Leary, whose own understanding of the psychedelic experience was that of a religious revelation, the ultimate destination of a strong dose of LSD was perfect selfless union with the cosmos, a state he called “ego death.” You ceased to be yourself — meaning that bundle of hangups and prejudices squeezed into an ape’s brain — and became a little living chip of a vast living god. So off I went to find that place.
My understanding of the mechanism of a trip is a little chaotic, but it seems to be consistent. In other words, every time I took enough of a chemical — every chemical I’ve tried — and went deep, deep down, I ended up dropping through the same layers into the same place. But when I say chaotic, I mean merely that after the first time it is comprehensible as a series of imprinted expectations.
If you expect to see god as an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud in the sky, that’s probably who you’ll see. And having seen him once, you’ll most certainly continue to see him in every subsequent trip. The upshot being that having experienced him once, you don’t actually need any of the subsequent trips since they merely confirm your first one. That’s the imprinting. You might as well give up taking hallucinogens. The journey is done.
The fact for me is that on my first directed trip in search of enlightenment (rather than the previous trips I’d taken merely to listen to music, have freaky sex, and enjoy the ride) I opened my mind and looked for god, for any god, for the Christian god or the worms in the soil or the Hindu pantheon or the throbbing vibrations of a space deity, and I didn’t find him. I went to the very base of my mind and he wasn’t there. And having returned with this failure — or rather this revelation of absence — it was imprinted in my psyche from that point forward, and every directed trip I’ve taken since, every deep dive into the heart of truth, I’ve ended up in exactly the same place.
That groove, so to speak, has been etched for me, and all I ever do is drop back into it.
I’ve written about this base level many times. It’s the basis of much of the psychology of my writing. I distilled my understanding of it, in a clumsy way for sure, in my novel The Music Of The Rending Of The Night (published in 2013 under the name Kare Mois). There, I called it both “the deep core CPU” and “the bone room.” I’ve alluded to it before in this blog. It is fundamental because it is that groove I ride. Essentially, I have no choice in the matter.
There are all kinds of layers to the mind. I’m no psychologist: I only experience what I experience in my own head, and I’m as mad as you are. There’s the conscious level, the level we’re both operating on now, where a dominant voice talks to us and we organize our thoughts into a constant stream of monologue, behind which sit the scrabbling hosts of our mental chorus all interjecting thought-fragments of their own, the little bastards.
It is this mental voice that drug experiences of all kinds try to shut up, even if it means that the chorus takes over instead. We drink to shut off the voice. We take cannabis or molly or whatever else is in fashion to shut off the voice. Other things do it, too: exercise, dancing, loud music, rollercoasters, sex. (Frightening, isn’t it, the way the chorus wells up at the moment of orgasm, with all those unbidden thoughts? Hardly something you’d want to think about.)
So beneath the conscious level are all the subconscious levels, a permission to speak granted to the chorus and to whatever nasty goblins are lurking around behind them with thoughts you can’t control and which can drag you through all kinds of sticky mental situations.
A medium-to-strong hallucinogenic experience can drop you out of the realm of the thinking consciousness (it’s still there, it’s just no longer in the driving seat) and into all that scrabble. Here are dreams and visions, fantasies and nightmares, the churning of suppressed memories and brutal, naked facts about yourself. Up they belch — or rather down you fall into them — and you’d better hold on tight if there’s something horrific in your psyche because the stronger the dose the less likely it is that you’ll avoid it. No chance for redemption when those sins come back to haunt you.
For that medium-to-strong dose I just mentioned, it’s usually navigable, depending on how experienced you are as a mental voyager, and how stable you consider yourself to be. I call it the thirty second surface. You go under, and if things get too hairy you can always push yourself back to the surface to draw in air, look around, convince yourself nothing’s actually changed since the last time you surfaced all of a thirty second eternity before, and let yourself drift back under again. Bad trips can be dismal but they’re usually simple to deal with, or to endure if you’re up for the challenge.
And let’s sink lower still, on a strong-to-mega-heroic dose. Way down here, under all those shifting layers of psychological disturbance, is what I think of as the realm of the soul-ego. Here is a tranquil place. Here is the deep, still, silent pool of thought where the ego drifts like a solitary whale in the pleasant oblivion of the ocean floor. Here is Leary’s goal, the spiritual goal, the meditative base, the layer of god.
Sink this far down and there are many reasons why you might consider this a spiritual phenomenon. There is, for example, the sense that you’ve worked your way through all that mental squalor above, and here’s a reward. There’s the sense, common to many trips I’ve had, that the early, most ferocious part of the trip has finally eased off, and the rest of the journey will be relatively peaceful. There’s the sense of being a survivor and a winner.
This is your gift to yourself: a delusory but heartfelt state of pure divinity.
And if this is as far as you get, good for you. You’ve found the realm of the soul-ego. You’ve joined with the saints and the mystics and the ascetics and the gurus and the prophets and everybody else who genuinely believe that down here in their drug trances or their fastings or their whirlings or their auto-asphyxiations or whatever else they used to get to this place they’ve found a heavenly truth. And indeed, it can be timeless, and your mental voice can seem to be subdued or switched off, and it can seem to be revelatory.
But there’s one more place to go. The final depth lies below this region, and I’ve been down there many times on my strongest trips. Always to the same place, and always to the same feeling. Go far enough below the realm of the soul-ego and you pop outwards into the true base of your mind, which is the mechanistic halls of the fundamentally physical: the deep core CPU.
Here there’s no time or space. There’s no cause and effect. There’s no forward progression. There’s no linear thought. There’s only the machinery of your mind receiving and processing input from its body and from its senses from moment to moment and dealing with each in turn.
This input is categorized in one way, and handled automatically. (Much of what happens down here is as automatic as the beating of your heart or the chemical processes of your liver and kidneys.) This input might be important to the conscious, decision-making mind, and is directed upwards.
Here is the base of the body’s understanding of itself as organism and collective, as an entity that lives and feeds and works and heals and reproduces. Here is the amoeba brain, the brain of everything that doesn’t need to think, above which are smeared, in various thicknesses, the consciousnesses of everything that does. Motive animals, reactive animals, predators and prey.
The deep core CPU is deeper than god, and more fundamental. It’s a physical state. A comprehensible state. A very simple machine state. The state of atoms and elemental forces. The godless, empty, uncaring, unencumbered rolling now of existence. Blank of thought and blank of caring. As worthlessly empty as a hollow skull: a bone room.
Imprinted, like I said. I dropped there once, quite by surprise, and so the groove was etched and every other time I’ve descended this far I’ve found myself in the same place because that’s what I expected to find, just as a person who sees that old man with the white beard is going to see him every time. I wanted god but I fell past him to somewhere more fundamental and, apparently, real. I’m not now able to pretend to myself that the deep core CPU doesn’t exist or that there’s something more to find.
So: the psychoanalysis. In fact, I didn’t want to find god. I was afraid that the spiritual realm might be real. So I found exactly what I truly wanted to find, just as everybody else does. It turns out that what I truly wanted to find was a comprehensible, mechanistic, physically simple universe. I wanted the world to be mundane and controllable and that’s just what I conjured up for myself. Hurrah for me.
And if so, then my bone room delusion is no different to the soul-ego delusion. It actually tells us nothing worthwhile, except about this specific psychology in this specific brain. Just as your revelation would, or Buddha’s, or Saint John’s, or Joan of Arc’s, or Gurdjieff’s, or Agrippa’s, or anybody else’s. We go deep enough into ourselves and we see what we want to see. And surely, if you discount my deep core CPU as wish-fulfilment, so too must you discount all these other revelations, the very basis of the mysticisms of faith.
And where does that leave us?
There’s little further point in me diving into the deep core. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. I’ve dropped down there too many times to think I’m ever going to see anything else. And in fact, that timeless staccato empire of the empirical bores me as a cosmic adventurer. I prefer the fantasies and the dreaming. When I go clunk out of the base of my mind into the CPU, it’s like an annoyance. (Retrospectively, I mean. In the moment there’s no thought to be annoyed.) A place to exist for as long as the trip keeps me there before I get thrashed back up to all that hummocky sex and squealing pixie festivals where things are so much more fun. I took too much. I went too far. Take less, drop less deep, enjoy yourself more. There’s nothing underneath but the computer motherboard that’s supporting all this neural busyness.
So I skim and wallow and dive only so far these days. I revel in the inventions of my deluded mind. I’ve long since discovered and come to grips with the worst of my psychology that the trip might reveal. I’m not that bad a guy, really. Honest, mom. The things that burn are always going to burn. So be it. And that being the case, I can still fertilize the mermaids.
But as a person, this individual mechanistic view of the universe is profound because it is something I have to accept as my reality: godless, physical, built on processes. And as a writer, as a dreamer of words, it beds everything I create in a verisimilitude of science, as indeed it must. For every fantasy there must be a rationale. For even the craziest of flights of imagination there must be a deep core of truth. That’s my grounding. That’s my stability. And that’s the bedrock on which I build my pretenses.
The header is a photo of a fairly young Robert Maas taken during one of his trips. I think I am 19, judging by the Roy Wood beard and John Lennon glasses. (Talk about wearing your heroes proudly!) Photographer undisclosed.
active maas 